The latest tactic of Instagram porn bots is ridiculously low effort, but it works

Porn bots are more or less ingrained in the social media experience, despite efforts by platforms to stamp them out. We’re used to seeing them flood the comment sections of memes and posts by celebrities, and if you have a public account, you’ve probably noticed them viewing and liking your stories. But their behavior changes ever so slightly to stay ahead of the automated filters, and now things are starting to get weird.

While at one time porn bots mostly tried to lure people in with suggestive or even overtly lewd hook-ups (like the ever-popular catchphrase, “Don’t look at my story, if you don’t want to jerk off!”), these days that approach is more A little abstract. It has become common to see bot accounts posting a single, innocuous and completely irrelevant word, sometimes accompanied by an emoji or two. In one post I recently found, five separate spam accounts all used the same profile photo — a close-up of a person wearing a red thong and spreading their butt — and commented: “Pristine 🌿,” “Music 🎶,” “Sapphire 💙,” and “ “Serenity 😌” and “Faith 🙏.”

Another bot — whose profile photo — a headless frontal shot of someone’s underwear-clad body — commented on the same post, “Michigan 🌟.” Once you notice them, it will be hard not to start keeping a mental record of the most ridiculous instances. “🦄Agriculture,” one of the robots wrote. In another post: “Horror 🌟” and “😍🙈 insect.” Weird one-word comments are everywhere; Porn bots seem to have completely lost it.

Really, what we’re seeing is the emergence of yet another avoidance maneuver that scammers use to help their bots slip through Meta’s detection technology. That, and maybe they’re getting a little lazy.

“They just want to get into the conversation, so having to craft a coherent sentence probably doesn’t make sense to them,” Satnam Narang, a research engineer at cybersecurity firm Tenable, told Engadget. Once scammers get their bots into the mix, they can get other bots to pile up likes on those comments to raise the profile of those comments, explains Narang, who has been investigating social media scams since the days of MySpace.

Using random words helps scammers fly under the radar of moderators who may be searching for certain keywords. In the past, they have tried methods such as putting spaces or special characters between each letter of words that might be flagged by the system. “You can’t necessarily ban or suspend an account if they just comment with the word ‘insect’ or ‘terrorism,’ because that’s very benign,” Narang said. “But if they say, ‘Check out my story,’ or something like that… that might point to their systems. It’s an evasion technique and it obviously works if you’re seeing them on these big-name accounts. It’s just part of that dance.”

This is a dance that social media platforms and bots have been doing for years, and it seems to have no end. dead It said it prevents millions of fake accounts from being created every day across its suite of apps, and catches “millions more, often within minutes after they’re created.” However, spam accounts are still widespread enough to appear in large numbers in high-traffic posts and slide into story views even for users with a small number of followers.

The company’s latest Transparency report, which includes statistics on fake accounts that have been removed, shows that Facebook took down more than a billion fake accounts last year alone, but does not currently provide any data for Instagram. “Spammers use every platform available to them to trick and manipulate people online and constantly adapt their methods to evade enforcement,” a Meta spokesperson said. “That’s why we invest heavily in our enforcement and review teams, and we have specialized detection tools to identify spam.”

Last December, Instagram rolled out a slew of tools aimed at giving users more visibility into how to handle spam bots and giving creators more control over their interactions with these profiles. Account holders can now, for example, bulk delete follow requests from profiles flagged as potential spam. Instagram users may also have noticed the frequent appearance of a “Hidden Comments” section at the bottom of some posts, where comments flagged as offensive or spam can be excluded to reduce engagement.

“It’s a game of whack-a-mole,” Narang said, and the scammers win. “You think you’ve got it, but then it pops up somewhere else.” He says scammers are very skilled at figuring out why they’re being banned and finding new ways to avoid detection accordingly.

One might assume that today’s social media users would be too savvy to fall for clearly written comments like “Michigan 🌟,” but according to Narang, scammers’ success doesn’t necessarily depend on tricking hapless victims into handing over their money. They often participate in affiliate programs, and all they need to do is get people to visit a website – usually labeled as an “adult dating service” or similar – and sign up for free. The ‘link in bio’ typically directs bots to an intermediary site hosting a set of URLs that may promise XXX chats or images and lead to the service in question.

Scammers can get a small amount of money, like a dollar or so, for every real user who creates an account. If someone signs up using a credit card, the commission will be much higher. “Even if it’s one percent of [the target demographic] “Sign up, you make some money,” Narang said. “And if you’re managing multiple different accounts and you have different profiles that are pushing those links out, you’re probably making a significant portion of the change.” Instagram scammers likely have spam bots on TikTok, X and other sites as well, Narang said. “It all adds up.”

The harms caused by spam bots go beyond any headaches they may ultimately cause to the few who are tricked into signing up for an unclear service. Porn bots primarily use photos of real people that they’ve stolen from public profiles, which can be embarrassing once the spam account starts friend requesting everyone the person pictured knows (speaking from personal experience here). The process of getting Meta to remove these cloned accounts can be a draining effort.

Their presence also adds to the challenges real content creators in the sex and sex-related industries face on social media, which many rely on as a way to connect with wider audiences but must constantly fight to avoid being cut off from the platform. Scam Instagram accounts can amass thousands of followers, turning potential visitors away from real accounts and questioning their legitimacy. Real accounts are sometimes flagged as spam in Meta’s bot search, putting those with racy content at greater risk of account suspension and ban.

Unfortunately, the robots problem is not a problem with an easy solution. “They are constantly looking for new ways [moderation]“Coming up with new plans,” Narang said. Scammers will always follow the money, and to that end, they follow the public. While porn bots on Instagram have evolved to the point of posting nonsense to avoid moderators, more sophisticated bots stalking a younger demographic on TikTok are posting somewhat believable comments on Taylor Swift’s videos, Narang says.

The next big thing in social media will inevitably emerge sooner or later, and they will go there too. “As long as there is money to be made, there will be incentives for these fraudsters,” Narang said.